Museum continues Artful Movements over Zoom
The Colby Museum of Art has been a gathering space for Colby students, staff, alumni as well as the greater Waterville and even wider Maine community. However, since COVID-19 the Museum has been forced to close its doors to those who are not a part of Colby’s test regime.
However, they are making the most of the current circumstances by offering events through their Artful Movements program. Initially launched in the fall of 2019, This program combines yoga and art in a prerecorded video that viewers can find on the museum website or even their Facebook page.
Jordia Benjamin, Senior Coordinator of Programs and Audience Engagement for the Museum explained the development of the Artful Movements program.
“We realized that not everyone that comes to the museum has an artistic background, but they were looking at everything as a way to navigate themselves internally. We also noticed that students were hosting stress busters and the most popular stress buster was yoga,” Benjamin said. “So the summer before we launched Artful Movements, we sat down and said, what if we were able to do something consistent since the stress busters come at the end of each semester, so we partnered with Kathleen from School Street Yoga.”
It turns out that yoga in museums is a very common occurrence and even has studies that support the benefits of this wellness activity. Colby’s approach, however, is unique compared to other museums.
“So, there are a hundred museums with yoga or yoga in galleries, but what makes ours unique is that all of our yoga sessions are based on a collection,” Benjamin explained. “So we spend a lot of time looking at pieces of art and finding similarities to yoga poses.”
This combination of art and yoga may seem a bit random from the outside, but Benjamin highlighted just how similar the two can be.
“It’s looking at the subject but also the content of a piece. Like what is the art actually saying, and yoga poses are always about inward reflection and self evaluation,” Benjamin said. “The more that you understand yourself, you are able to broaden your perspective of others and cultures. So we take that same kind of mindset towards our collections.”
She further expanded on this by addressing the most recent release on Oct. 3 titled Artful Movements: Time to Let Go, which focused on the connection between Martin Puryear’s Up and Over (2014) and the yoga pose downward-facing dog.
“Puryear’s work really looks at understanding history in a broader form and having it affect one’s personal understanding of self is the same as understanding identity which is the basic core of building onto oneself” Benjamin said. “Downward-facing dog is the basic yoga pose you learn, and so you build upon that. It affects your body head to toe, so these are levels that we are relating artwork to.”
The program has seen quite a lot of growth. In fact, the Oct. 3 release amassed 1900 views on Facebook. They have even added two additional branches to the program, Artful Meditation and Artful Healing. Participants range from kids to even senior citizens. This program has also been a way to support local businesses during this time of uncertainty.
The Artful Movement events are released on the first Saturday of every month but are available at all times, so if you ever need a break from work, or even your family and friends, take some time for yourself and tune into an Artful Movements video.
“It’s open to any and everybody the only thing you have to have is an interest,” Benjamin said.
